D-Link's new DNS-343 four-drive RAID 5 NAS has been added to the NAS Charts.

The DNS-343 is compact, with little wasted space, but has a brick-sized (7"x2"x3") external power supply. An OLED display on the front panel is used to show drive and network activity as well as a variety of status information.

The CPU is a Marvell 88F5281-D0 C500, the same as used in the dual-drive DNS-323. A Marvell 88SX7042 is used for the SATA ports, while a Marvell 88E1118 provides the Ethernet port. There is 128 MB of RAM, 16 MB of flash and a SyncMOS SM5964A 8 bit micro controller.

Up to four 3.5" SATA drives of "any size" can be inserted and configured as individual drives, JBOD or RAID 0, 1 or 5 arrays. You must power down the NAS to change drives, since hot-swap is not supported.

The feature set is the same as the DNS-323, with the addition of RAID 5 capability and the subtraction of the BitTorrent download capability that was recently added in 1.05 firmware. Only the CIFS/SMB network file system is supported and you can't join Microsoft NT domains or Active Directory for user authentication. There are email alerts, but no logging and administration via HTTPS isn't supported.

RAID 5 write performance with a gigabit LAN connection averaged only 15.3 MB/s for file sizes between 32 MB and 1 GB. Read performance for the same conditions averaged 29.7 MB/s.

Use the NAS Charts to run your own comparisons and check out the slideshow for internal details and a user interface tour.

Read the full review..

Tags: BYOD, D-Link, NAS, RAID,

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